Singing the Sweet Tune of a CAFO?
- Topics:
- Blog, Meat Industry
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010, 12:40 PM
What do you think… A blogger is paid by the Pork Board — the marketing arm of the pork industry — to blog about pork.
Any conflict of interest there, you think?
Maybe a little?
The bloggers in question, who write the pork, knife and spoon blog, say that their funding doesn’t change their editorial line. They just love pork. It’s that simple.
But my eyebrows got a little more of a raise when the bloggers visited a CAFO hog farm – hand-picked by the industry, mind you – and waxed poetic about how lovely it was.
Read below for my comment, which should be posted to the site, too:
“I’ve long heard the line from the pork industry – which funds your site and set up your visit – that hogs appreciate being separated from their young, lest they roll over on ‘em.
I’m not so sure. As Bonnie Powell notes, hogs are at least as social as dogs and I’ve visited plenty of sustainable hog farms where families of pigs were co-existing happily – no mom’s killing their babies. But that kind of operation requires a different scale of production, one that’s not possible in the CAFO model.
What’s missing from your description of this one particular CAFO is not only a critical eye to these inhumane conditions, among others, but to the broader environmental and social context of these operations.
Sadly, we have reams of evidence that hog CAFOs are energy-intensive, polluting factories that have led to illness and death for workers as well as community members who must live near them. The industry has also been repeatedly found in violation of environmental regs. In 1997 alone, Smithfield, the nation’s largest hog producer, was fined $12.6 million for knowingly violating the Clean Air Act. Livestock production, including hog CAFOs, are now such a worrisome player in the global climate change that the United Nations Environment Program has advocated for reducing the production of meat and dairy in CAFOs.”
Want to hear a different story about CAFOs? Check out this documentary by UK journalist Tracy Worcester and read The CAFO Reader.
Or, maybe you just need the visual reminder.
How about this
Versus this
June 16th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
While I do share your feelings about CAFO and how Shauna’s post was… unbelievable, I do have to call out a little disagreement:
“What do you think… A blogger is paid by the Pork Board — the marketing arm of the pork industry — to blog about pork.
Any conflict of interest there, you think?
Maybe a little?”
There isn’t any conflict of interest there. It means you’re an employee. Being a blogger doesn’t infer any individuality or disconnect from big business. Heck, I know of more than a few bloggers whose job is to blog for a large (or even small) company.
There would (or could), however, be bias. But that’s not conflict of interest. Blogger doesn’t connote ‘unbiased’. It merely connotes ’someone who blogs’.
That said, I wouldn’t trust a marketing arm of the pork council to be unbiased any more than I’d trust a Ford dealer to be unbiased about whose cars are best.
June 16th, 2010 at 5:40 pm
I can understand how the pig in grass would appear to be safer and happier. The pigs in pens are protected from the sometimes horrible weather of the midwest states. See what happens when an F3 tornado roars through a hog farm here: http://fencerowtofencerow.blogspot.com/2010/06/gone-in-60-seconds.html
Fairly certain the free range pigs would have been helpless. I am reminded that we need all sorts of methods to raise food in order to feed the growing population.
June 21st, 2010 at 2:11 pm
Great points — I see what you mean and you’re right: bloggers don’t connote “unbiased” and we shouldn’t presume that. We just need to keep in mind the bias of the blogger as we read. Reading with eyes wide open. Anna
June 21st, 2010 at 2:12 pm
The free range farmers I know would protect their livestock from tornadoes. You don’t need to be housed in close confinement to be protected during times of natural disasters.